


Painted Past Times

by MaxKowarth



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio), Doctor Who: Eighth Doctor Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: Developing Relationship, Investigations, The Doctor (Doctor Who) is an Idiot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-13 17:50:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19256170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaxKowarth/pseuds/MaxKowarth
Summary: The TARDIS drops its crew into the crypt, or has she? Either way, Liv Chenka is not best pleased, but at least she's with Helen





	1. Lock Box

**Author's Note:**

> The Tamiya Paint colour chart informs one of the futuristic devices in this story.

“7 minutes. 7 entire minutes. I think that’s a record even for him” Liv Chenka was aware that she had many shades to her moods. On Kaldor, another life ago, there had been a fad for relaxation chambers that could evoke specific moods in the occupant. As the Elite and rival families tried to outdo each other with increasingly ostentatious devices the available variations menu became longer and longer.   
She had started this morning aboard the TARDIS firmly planted in X12. She had opened her eyes to meet the smiling face of Helen Sinclair and they had spent quite some time just staring and smiling at each other before the scent of bacon had drawn them to the kitchen. 

Her mood had slacked down to X8 on discovering that the scent was all that existed, the TARDIS food machine having decided that all cereal today would smell of it.

The Doctor, the most infuriating best friend a girl could wish for in or out of Time and Space, had assured them both that it was simply a matter of restoring the factory setting to the scent molecules. Helen assumed it was not that easy and the Doctor was forced to admit that his first attempt to correct the fault had resulted in the bacon thing.  
Liv offered to take a look and solved the problem in a full 30 seconds when she found a chunk of bacon trapped in one of the matter injectors. Helen didn’t say a thing, just grinned broadly and tried hard not to actually laugh out loud.  
By the time they had landed her mood had edged up to X27. It was a heady cocktail of excitement, trepidation and curiosity with subtle shades of ‘How long till something goes wrong.’

As she was presently pointing out, the answer was 7 minutes.

Her mood was now utterly XF69. The TARDIS had materialised inside an ornately decorated chamber. Helen was over the moon, mistaking it for some Egyptian burial cavern which neither she nor the Doctor had been inclined to explain to Liv. The Doctor was part way through explaining instead that the room wasn’t even on Earth when he had vanished completely. The only clue to his whereabouts being the sonic screwdriver, abandoned on the floor next to a fairly dull plinth that had been decorated with eight long buttons.

“Not really, I’m sure he’s stepped straight into trouble before we’ve opened the doors before.” Helen replied. She had been studying the wall behind the plinth. The ornate friezes seemed to cluster around a central point.  
“You know, that has to be a language, it has all the hall marks of text and yet…” she trailed off and started drawing her working in the air, as if hallucinating a blackboard.

Liv wanted to be angry with her but instead she just stared at her best friend being brilliant. She found herself blushing and insisted to herself that this was entirely due to not being clever enough to follow what she was doing.   
Eventually her mood had slumped all the way to a PS5 and she was stomping around the small room in the search for any other clues at all. She slapped the chunky sonic against her palm as she went around her circuit, narrowly avoided colliding with Helen and aimed the alien device at the buttons on the plinth in anger.  
The sonic burred like a wasp trapped in a double glazed window and precisely nothing happened.  
“Oh for…” she began but Helen had stopped muttering and placed a soft hand on Liv’s shoulder. The older woman tried not to tense up or in any way let her friend see the effect the touch had on her. Not that it would have mattered, Helen was in investigative mode and wouldn’t see the MS10 if it stuck its tongue in her ear.

“Now that IS interesting.”  
“How? Nothing happened.”  
“Precisely. The Doctor says that the sonic screwdriver works on almost every mechanism.”  
“Yeah, right. This is the same Doctor who didn’t think to look for a blockage before tackling a software issue?”

“No no, you don’t follow. The simpler the mechanism the less use that is. ” Helen began, teasing their thought processes out.   
“And since this was on the ground the Doctor must have been trying to use it. Probably on these buttons, just as I did.”  
“But since nothing happened, and both of us are still here it couldn’t have worked. So what did he do instead?” they looked at each other with long suffering smiles and said, in unison.   
“He presses the buttons”

Liv was reaching for the plinth but Helen grabbed her wrist. “Wait. We need to understand what these buttons do. If we both get dragged somewhere else we won’t know how to get back to the TARDIS. And we can’t guarantee we’ll end up wherever he went.”  
“And he’s unlikely to have stayed still waiting for us.” 

Helen pointed to the wall “You’re from the future, what does that say to you?”  
Liv snorted “might as well be sheet music for all it says to me.” Helen's eyes went wide and her jaw dropped. She drew Liv into an enveloping hug that Liv was truly upset to find didn’t last very long.

“Have I ever told you, you’re brilliant? Because you are you truly, truly are!” before Liv could reply Helen had skipped to the row of buttons and pointed along them “Do, Ray, Me, Far, So, Lah, Tee, Doh.”  
“Is this some arcane old world ritual to understand even older scribbles?”  
“Scales, don’t tell me humanity have forgotten how music works in your time.”  
“If you were to listen to my Dad, humanity forgets how music works every 12 years.”  
“I am really going to have to show you ‘The Sound of Music’ some time.” Helen commented as she cracked her knuckles and started playing the 8 keys, albeit tentatively. There was a clunk from the floor and Liv leapt away just before the hole swung open. 

They looked down the hole and straight into the face of their rather bemused companion. “Hello” he waved. “Come and have a look at this” he wandered away from the hole and Helen was all ready to jump after him.   
Liv placed a palm squarely on her chest then dived to the Tardis and returned with the hat stand, using it to prop the hole open first.   
Helen kissed Liv’s cheek making her gasp and blush. “Brilliant” she winked and dropped down to join the time lord.   
MS8 now. Totally MS8.

\--  
Helen Sinclair was gradually coming to realise that she was being watched. This was quite a feat given how dark the tunnel they had dropped into was. The Doctor didn’t seem to care about the low light as he was pointing out all sort of charming features in the carvings that Helen couldn’t see at all. 

There was the sound of a zip close to her ear and the tunnel was bathed in light. She glanced at the pen torch Liv had nonchalantly produced and let that adoring smile reclaim her features. Liv didn’t notice, she was trying to work out what the Doctor was talking about.  
“Watch your heads” was the Doctor’s only word of warning as he carried on. He failed to point out that the entire tunnel narrowed and his two friends found themselves pressed together.  
Helen swallowed. Liv flushed. 

“You should…” they both said. Liv handed her the torch.   
“No, you know what he’s talking about, after you.” She lifted her hand to push on Helen’s hip encouragingly. Somehow her palm ended under the hem of her shirt and pressed at the warm flesh below. There was a sharp intake of breath followed by a noise that made both flush.

Helen scooted ahead.  
“It’s alright, it gets wider up here.” She called back, nervously tucking her shirt into her jeans. The feeling of being watched returned but this time she knew precisely who was behind it. “Are you catching up or?”  
“I’m starring behind. Staying, staying behind. Just in case.” Liv stuttered.  
Helen smirked and reached back to her, clasping her hand firmly to drag her along in her wake. When had she become so bold, so determined? Helen wondered to herself. She knew the answer immediately. She was holding the answer in her hand.  
“Something’s not right” Liv scowled and Helen nervously let go of her hand only to have the grip retaken. “Can’t you hear it?”  
“All I can hear is the Doctor and our footsteps”  
“well the Doctor never seems right. What about our footsteps?”

Helen paused and cast the torch beam to their feet. Sand, or at least dust, which reinforced the ancient tomb aesthetic. “Sand, why are we hearing footsteps on sand?”


	2. Terminus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liv and Helen find out what the Dr's been up to

Helen paused and cast the torch beam to their feet. Sand, or at least dust, which reinforced the ancient tomb aesthetic. “Sand, why are we hearing footsteps on sand?”  
“Because it’s not real.” Liv replied as if it were the most obvious thing. She thumped her heel down with a clang. “Not sand, sandpaper”

“Are you two coming?” the Doctor called back at them. He was evidently excited at what he’d found, you hear the grin in his voice. Helen’s frown bordered on a scowl as they caught up.

He was stood in a doorway, arms wide as if orating to a full house at Old Trafford. “Just look at that view.” He beamed. Helen gasped and ducked under his still spread arms to move across to the bubble shaped window. It looked out onto a vivid nebula in deep space, rainbow colours obscuring a planetoid on the other side.  
“Oh my, isn’t that beautiful.” The blonde grinned. Liv was less impressed; she had once been used to such views and had come to regard them as little more than a navigational hazard like moose crossing a freeway.

“Doctor, we took about 9 minutes to open up that door and get to you. And you spent all that time staring at space?”  
“It is rather wonderful space” Helen pointed out.   
“If you like that sort of thing” Liv didn’t want to be distracted. “What’s it doing under a fake tomb?”  
“AH!” it was the Doctor’s turn to beam “you see, that’s what I love about you Liv, always on hand to ask the pertinent questions. Now, to answer things in order, I spent much of my time trying to work out the constellations, find an idea of where abouts we are. Go on Liv, take a look.” He prompted, a little smugly for her liking.

She moved to the window with a resigned sigh. “You do know I haven’t been around the entire universe in a ship with windows don’t you?” her sentence trailed off with an ‘Oh’ of realisation. “TS40.”  
The exclamation rather threw both of her companions. “Not quite depressed, a sort of metallic black not a Goth black.”  
“Are you talking about moods or paints?” Helen enquired with a grin.  
“Both. You can’t identify which constellations they are because the view is as fake as the floor.” Liv announced.   
“But the planet moves, the mist moves…” Helen argued, moving close enough to Liv to peer at the window, one hand rested on her friends thigh as she bent over.

“Nebula” supplied the Doctor. “Why is it a fake?”  
“Why is any of it a fake? Why put a secret trapdoor in a tomb that leads to space? It’s not as though a corpse would need the view.” Liv was exasperated, bored with this pointless mystery and trying hard not to let the warmth of Helen’s palm on her thigh colour her voice.  
“Because it wasn’t a secret for whoever built it?” Helen suggested. She straightened and started looking around the rest of the room with same determination she had in the original chamber. “Traps and tricks in Hollywood tombs are all about keeping robbers out, Boris Karloff and all that.” Helen paid no attention to Liv’s blank expression beyond a smile that promised she’d explain later. “Most tombs were actually designed for the convenience of the interred. All the things they’d need to take with them into the afterlife.”  
“So, you think someone needed to play music to reach the stars?” Liv frowned sceptically.  
“That isn’t an unusual theological position. Hymns to heaven?” The Doctor suggested now that his attention had been lifted from the window. How he’d failed to notice the brush strokes on space was beyond him. “But even then, well once you’re here, how are you supposed to get back?”  
“Heavens a one way journey, usually” Liv snorted.  
Helen stood at the doorway and hummed to herself. Liv recognised the tune as the one she had played to open the trap door. “Oh, unless you have to reach to the heavens” she moved forward, arm outstretched towards the distant planet. Liv reached to stop her at the precise moment the window pivoted, swinging the entire effect around them. 

“Well, that explains why the route seems to be one way.” The Doctor announced as he joined them.  
The room ahead was plush, comfortable and dominated by a sumptuous bed. A body lay at its centre, long decayed but still framed with curls of red hair. Helen turned her face way, her curiosity subsumed by deference to the departed.  
Liv held onto her, felt her breath raw against her ear but for once took no pleasure from her friend’s closeness.  
“It really was a tomb?” She qualified.  
“It certainly looks that way… aha, what have we here?” the Doctor stepped back as a screen burred into view above the bed. A pale redhead appeared, smiling benevolently before it spoke.

“Welcome fellow adventurer.” Intoned the image, not quite in synch with the movements of the lips, as if badly dubbed. “I do not know what has drawn you to my final rest but I should thank you for your interest. I am, was by the time you hear this” the noise the screen made was in synch but garbled nonsense. Liv assumed it was the deceased name in its own language. “And I have used my final year to construct the sort of journey I had yearned for all my days. As a writer it was my lot to imagine the ways of old Earth, the simpler lives of our pre colonial ancestors and the drive that must have taken them to the stars. I hope you too; have felt that theme in your journey to meet me.”

“It’s a one woman theme park?” Liv was bemused, as much by why the TARDIS felt this worthy of her crew’s time as the implausibility of the concept  
The Doctor shrugged and lifted his sonic as if to scan the room before the recording started again.  
“If it is you,” another garbled noise, potentially a different name. “With your soft skin and deep eyes, then I can only send you all my love from Long ago. I wish our lives had been different. That the last breath we shared on the lunar shuttle had been a welcome rather than a goodbye. Know this, whoever you are, across all of history anger drives us forward. But love lives on.”  
The recording faded from view and The Doctor lowered the sonic. 

“More of a personal eulogy than a theme park I think. That explains why the corridor got smaller though”  
“What does?” Helen replied, her eyes finally taking in more the room.  
“The corpse, compared to the recording she must have been wasting away.” Liv replied for her. The Doctor lent over the body to a photograph led on the bed. From its angle it must have fallen from the corpse’s grasp. It showed a rather dull cabin interior with the redhead and a striking brunette woman locked in a passionate embrace.  
“Must be,” The Doctor made the second of the two vocalisations and his friends stared at him. With great reverence he returned the photo to the deceased’s hands as they lay across her chest. “One mystery solved.”  
Liv was ready to step in and argue a point, except that she felt somehow that she was stepping on something a little close to home. She felt Helen’s hand find hers and turned to look back into those familiar eyes.   
“Let’s go home. She’s delivered her message, she will be remembered.” Helen explained.  
Liv decided not to press any of the points, her mind entirely on pressing something completely different somewhere completely different.  
“I’ll see you there.” The Doctor told them and set about resetting the tomb.


End file.
